Gestalt

by grace (ge) gilbert

It’s 2022. I sit here with a microwavable heat pad on my inflamed stomach, which has now left a rash that looks like cirrus clouds when you drive under them on a highway over a field. It’s a burnt orange heating pad from the Internet. The inside is supposed to smell like lavender (is lavender>?) but, from overuse, it smells like burnt corn. I just made my partner very upset. I say things sometimes. That’s what we do to each other. He tells it to me like that—“you just say things sometimes.” He works in radio. I work in something embarrassing. I make tahini cookies and we sit in separate rooms, me with my heat pad, him with his unbearable, iron-clad headphones through which he can hear nothing nothing in our small domestic reserve. If I’m not careful, I can wield some tiny careless shivs. It’s a father thing. The sky is so perfect it looks microbladed and we cross the gaudy pedestrian crosswalk near Frick Park not speaking. A dizzy strobe light a hundred feet up tells cars that we’re there. It was installed due to the very centralized efforts of two parents who lost their daughter to that crosswalk the very same. Her name was Evelyn Wei. There’s a small, rusted plaque from 2004 that’ll tell you that. We stop to read it, still not speaking. I’ve lived here for two years and never noticed until this week. Later, I listen to JET! while thinking about surgery. I ask B if, theoretically, he could fall in love with a trans person if I wasn’t in the picture. He shrugs. I just love you. Silence chirps, then the birds. We keep walking. If you Google how many trans people there are and what that even means, you’ll get a lot of weird statistics from questionable sources insinuating that the kids are not alright. President Biden, when asked how many genders there are, says “at least three.” The world is trying with two separate hammers. Bathrooms are unfortunate, fashion tells people how to look at you on the train. We know all this. I must remind myself—when dealing with any ailment or feature of my life—that I am not a warp in the silkscreen. Common means common. I’m in love, I have stomach problems, I was cursed with boobs. Common. And we spin on, with suffering & legislation so unique it could just knock you upside the head, leave you fucked and bleeding. As this being, I’ll miss the Pittsburgh days where light shat itself in bent pockets over bent sidewalks. Crooked beat. Driving through Ohio is like Waiting for Godot and driving through New York I’m eclipsing. Somewhere in the middle, I’ll miss the sun. That harbinger. Anything new provides entry wounds. Brooklyn. Where I imagine myself in little mullet parades, wearing a colorful little Joseph scarf and living in a rowhouse. They are there right now doing incredible things with little money, little land. Eating a little rye bread with olive oil and carrying a fifteen-pound tub of cat litter for miles. All very Patti Smith, smiling into grime. Trans aside, body stuff is odd, the whole lot of it. Wherever I am, if I’m not careful, I’ll find myself Googling “is coconut water good for you” and listening to a podcast about a man’s experience with Noom. I get carried away in that regard. I can’t write anything when I feel like I’m already dead. Here trying to think of a novel idea. We watch Tampopo. I think of Knausgard and how a trans person could never have written Min Kamp. In other languages there are no particular pronouns for gender, no he or she. I do not speak these languages but I keep these facts with me. Success and trans both mean so many different things, I have trouble finding a path in either. I’m selling clothes on the internet. I took to it when I got so nondescript I looked like bones and a liver. There were things in my closet that I wore on first dates with boring men who are now embedded in my mother’s scrapbooks. Jeans that once held hips I had lost somewhere between Murray and Braddock, somewhere in the years of waning. Dresses handed down by friends who had stored that previous, uber-feminine body in plastic lock-top bins in their childhood bedrooms, bins that their mothers keep pulling out and fawning over. The off-white taffeta gown I wore to a wedding before I was old enough to drink or realize just how incredibly tasteless my faux pas. Things that now hold loose and lazy on me like their associate memories. It was all too sluggish, and it needed to go. Sometimes the app I sell on will even show up exhausted. “Long story short, I need a nap,” the automated copy will indulge at 8:05 PM on a regular Sunday. Me too. My first year in Pittsburgh, I was a woman. It wasn’t so much a coward thing. It was avoidance and an overdraft fee. You need money for realness. Everything else is head-to-toe polyester, box dye. One evening I found Fleetwood Mac’s TUSK! at a cash-only record store in some abandoned warehouse. B and I had a map of Pittsburgh’s record stores and every week drove or walked or bused to the next one on the list. We were hanging out a lot then, as friends with a very tangible inch or two between or fingertips as we walked. We were very charged, and so we walked. Everywhere. Miles and miles from our shitty apartments to parks and overpasses and playgrounds and back. We visited museums and ate bad tacos and shared headphones on the bus. We talked about everything and probably too much. It was incessant and likely inappropriate given my too-long relationship, but we couldn’t not do it. We listened to TUSK! in my apartment with the broken molded-through pipes, roaches, barred windows. I was in the best shape of my life, in the worst form. I ate like shit. I was in love.

grace (ge) gilbert is a hybrid writer based in Pittsburgh. they received their MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022, where they now serve as a Visiting Lecturer. they are the author of 3 chapbooks: the closeted diaries: essays (Porkbelly Press 2022), NOTIFICATIONS IN THE DARK (Antenna Books 2023), and today is an unholy suite (forthcoming; Barrelhouse 2023). their work can be found in 2023’s Best of the Net Anthology, the Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, the Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. They teach hybrid collage and poetics courses at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and they are a 2023 Visiting Teaching Artist at the Poetry Foundation. they are passionate about making the hybrid arts accessible to all. find course offerings and more at gracegegilbert.com.